Why You Can't Resist Cravings (and How to Take Back Control) | Atomic Habits | Imam Tom Weekly

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Why You Can't Resist Cravings (and How to Take Back Control) | Atomic Habits | Imam Tom Weekly

Hyper-processed foods, flashy marketing, and addictive tech—have you ever wondered why we can’t stop craving things that are bad for us?

What if you could uncover these tactics and break free? In this episode, Imam Tom Facchine dives deep into the next chapter of Atomic Habits, explaining how these concepts manipulate our brains and, more importantly, how understanding them can help you reclaim focus, build better habits, and realign with what truly matters.

Watch on YouTube

This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.

The Law of Attraction. Make it Attractive. Now, he starts this chapter with a science experiment where there's a type of gull, seagull, right? A bird that it has a beak and the beak has a red spot.

The chicks in the nest will start pecking at the red spot and the mother or the father will then give food to the chicks. So, check out how crazy this experiment is - it's wild.

So, somebody decided to make a very, very poor imitation of a seagull, right? Like cardboard, basically. And make a red spot on the beak, but make it huge. Make it larger than normal.

Now, when he held up that fake, very, very obviously fake bird to the nest, what the chicks did, the chicks started pecking at the dot very, very vigorously. More vigorously than

at the mother, which had a normal sized red dot. What they found from this is that when any sort of creature is exposed to a stimulus or used to a stimulus, there's an anticipation of a reward.

And if the stimulus is increased, then the motivation is even higher, even if the delivery of the food is still the same. Now, this is really, really interesting. We live in,

they call this by the way, supernormal stimuli. It's basically exaggerations of reality. And once you understand that there's a term for this, you'll see that our modern culture has this everywhere. Every single bad habit that people are addicted to, it essentially comes down to

a supernormal stimuli, some exaggeration of reality, temptations that previous people of earlier times never had to face. The food industry, okay? You've got food that has no

nutritional value whatsoever, but it's got more sugar than any food has ever had. It's got more fats and more, you know, this and that and salts and hydrogenated oils and all these sorts of

things that it produces cravings for these foods that are exaggerated cravings. We also fall into this with body image, right? And this is why many people get addicted to pornography, that

the images or the body images that people are exposed to through the media are exaggerations. They're not real. They're exaggerated stimuli. And so people, they get addicted, like their

anticipation of the reward. They are super stimulated because of the exaggeration of the cue that's being thrown at them. Social media is also another one that he points out. Go throughout your whole day at home and count how many times someone compliments you or like praises you.

Then go online and make like two posts on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or something like that. And compare how many likes and comments of praise you get. Social media is essentially a super

stimuli. It exaggerates how much praise and thanks that you get. And so all of these super stimuli cause addictions, whether it's addiction to junk food or addiction to pornography or addiction to

social media or addiction to other things. How does this work when it comes to your body and anticipating things? And how does this, what does this mean for our habits? We can actually,

if we realize what's going on, we can harness it for our own uses. So this is about dopamine. Many of you are familiar with this idea. It's this hormone called dopamine that your body produces

when it anticipates a reward. What happens when you're first exposed to a cue, but you're not aware of what that cue is. Second, you start to get a craving. You see a commercial. Let's say you

get it. Let's say you see a Pepsi commercial. That's the cue. There's people, they're young, they're attractive. They're having fun on the, on the TV. And you know, that's how they make you want this drink. You start to get a craving. Next time you go to the store, the baqala, you pick up a

Pepsi, you drink it, you're blasted with sugar. And so your dopamine spikes. Now that was the first time. Check out what happens the second time. The key at the level of the cue, you see

the commercial and you're already getting your blast of dopamine because you're anticipating. You're not even given the Pepsi yet. Now this anticipation drives you to go to the store. Maybe you go out of your way to go to the store and get that Pepsi now, but notice what happens with the

dopamine. You don't get it when you actually experience the thing. When you get the reward this time, you actually experienced the dopamine early when you're anticipating the reward. Scenario number three, they said, well, what happens if somebody sees the cue and anticipates

the reward, but then they don't get it. So let's imagine you see the Pepsi commercial. You have this incredible craving for Pepsi. You go out, that's your response, but there's no Pepsi at the store. You crash. Your dopamine levels actually tank. Then what's going to happen in the last

scenario. The next time you see the cue, the Pepsi commercial, you experienced the craving, you want one, you go out and get it. You're not sure your body's almost preparing you for disappointment, but this time they have it. Boom, another spike. And this is how habits are formed.

This is the dopamine loop. And the author points out that this distinguishes the difference about between wanting something and liking something. And he argues that wanting something

is far more powerful than liking something on the body. Anticipating a reward is actually better than getting the reward itself. So what does this mean for us and our habits? Well, that brings us

to something that the author calls temptation bundling. Temptation bundling is basically linking an action that you want to do with an action that you have to do. Okay. So there are

things that you're doing that maybe they're not the best things that you're doing. Let's say you're watching television. You watch Netflix. Is it haram? No. Is it the best thing to do? No. But you want to do something like study Arabic, or you want to do something like push-ups. You want to

get in shape a little bit. All right. How can you use temptation bundling to form new habits? Well, you basically link the action that you want to do to the action that you need to do. So if I'm

watching a television show and it's got commercials and I want to also get more fit, I'm going to say I'm going to do 20 push-ups every commercial break. So I get the show that I'm watching,

and I also get the fitness or the exercise that I'm trying to go for. Okay. What happens when you link these two things? Your body begins to associate the thing that you kind of don't want to do, which is push-ups in this case. It begins to associate it with the thing that you

actually like to do. So it gets a positive association. And corporations use this type of thing all the time to manipulate you and to sell you their products. But if you recognize it, you can see when it's being used against you. And you can also attempt to use it for you.

Think about something that you're currently doing that you like to do. It's fun. It's a TV show, or it's a snack that you enjoy. You sit down and you have a bar of chocolate or whatever.

Tie something that you need to do, whether it is reciting Quran or something physical exercise, or it's reading more or whatever it is, tie it to that thing.

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